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V. S. Naipaul - Biographical

Naipaul is Truly a Nobel Man in a Free State

by David Pryce-Jones

The Nobel Prize for literature has gone to someone
who deserves it. Like the great masters of the past, V.S. Naipaul
tells stories which show us ourselves and the reality we live in.
His use of language is as precise as it is beautiful. Simple, strong
words, with which to express the humanity of all of us.

Born in Trinidad in 1932, the descendant of
indentured labourers shipped from India, this dispossessed child
of the Raj has come on a long and marvellous journey. His upbringing
familiarised him with every sort of deprivation, material and cultural.
A scholarship to Oxford brought him to this country. Nothing sustained
him afterwards except the determination, often close to despair,
to become a writer. Against all likelihood, a spirit of pure comedy
flows through his early books. It is a saving grace.

Footloose, he began to travel for long periods
in India and Africa. It was at a time of decolonisation, when so
many people the whole world over had to reassess their identity.
Naipaul saw for himself the resulting turmoil of emotions, that
collision of self-serving myth and guilt which make up today's bewildered
world and prevents people from coming to terms with who they really
are, and to know how to treat one another. On these travels he was
exploring nothing less than the meaning of culture and history.

Victimhood might have been his central theme,
granted his background. Not at all. That same determination to be
a writer also liberated him from self-pity. Each one of us, his
books declare, can choose to be a free individual. It is a matter
of will and choice, and above all intellect. Critics have sometimes
argued that people - in the Third World especially - are trapped
in their culture and history without possibility of choice, and
can only be free if others make them so. To them, V.S. Naipaul's
vision that they have to take responsibility for themselves can
seem like some sort of First World privilege, and a conservative
philosophy at that.

Quite the contrary: the absolute rejection of
victimhood is necessary if we are to meet as we must on an equal
footing, and it is no exaggeration to say that he has shifted public
opinion towards this understanding as no other writer has done.
Courage and persistence were required to hold a belief quite so
unfashionable in recent years, but it is this belief that has made
Naipaul the universal writer and humanist that he is.

The comic spirit is still present, though submerged
in his later books beneath a darkening sense of tragedy. Naipaul
has written about slavery, revolution, guerrillas, corrupt politicians,
the poor and the oppressed, interpreting the rages so deeply rooted
in our societies. Long before others, he began to report on the
irrational frenzy loosed these past two decades by religion in the
Islamic world from Iran to Indonesia and Pakistan. This phenomenon
too was a retreat from history into self-serving myth. Self-pity
possesses Islamic fundamentalists so absolutely that they are able
to close out everything else. Yet Naipaul also observed with profound
insight that even the most fanaticised among them know that the
West will always be there setting the objective standards, and that
they can do nothing about that. They are to be pitied for rage so
helpless.

In himself, Naipaul is a private man, who lives
in the country in order to have the solitude for thinking and writing.
Everything that has ever happened to him is pigeonholed with exactitude
in his memory. Formidably well-read, he can quote books he read
years ago, and all the conversations he has had. Melancholy grips
him at the spectacle of "the steady grinding down of the old
world" as he put it, and he might complain to an interviewer
that he is living in a "plebeian culture that celebrates itself."

Other writers born abroad have settled here
and enriched our literature, but there has never been one like Naipaul.
His personal story is moving; his achievement extraordinary. There
is a great moral to his life's work, that the human comedy will
come out all right because, when all is said and done, intellect
is more powerful than vicissitude and wickedness.

The writer is the author of "The Closed
Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs".

This autobiography/biography was written
at the time of the award and later published in the book series Les
Prix Nobel/Nobel Lectures/The Nobel Prizes. The information is sometimes updated with an addendum submitted
by the Laureate.